Mile Twelve visits Club Passim with new and traditional bluegrass sounds

By Ed Symkus, Correspondent

Wednesday

Jan 2, 2019 at 6:18 PMJan 2, 2019 at 6:18 PM

There wasn’t any bluegrass spinning around in Evan Murphy’s head when he was growing up in Milton. Nor was he playing guitar, though there was one sitting in a corner, gathering dust.

But these days, he’s writing songs, singing, and playing guitar in the bluegrass quintet Mile Twelve, which will be premiering a batch of new tunes when they return to Club Passim on Jan. 10.

He’s been singing all along, but when he was a kid it was in musicals. A guitar came on the scene when he was in third grade, and there were some lessons. “But that only lasted for a couple of months because I didn’t have the desire or focus for it at that point,” said Murphy from his home in South Boston. “It wasn’t till I was 18 and going to Boston College that I decided to learn how to play it.”

That was when a guitarist dorm-mate across the hall said he was looking for someone to play with. Murphy, who was a fan of Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, and Billy Joel, and had brought his rarely-used guitar with him to school, sat down with his new friend, and the two guys started swapping songs.

“We would play Beatles songs or Tom Petty songs, but he was also into the Avett Brothers and Old Crow Medicine Show,” said Murphy, “so he got me interested in some folk and bluegrass music. He said to me, ‘You should learn banjo, too,’ and I did.”

That led to Murphy going online and coming across a mention of Banjo Camp North, an intense weekend workshop for banjo players in western Massachusetts, which he attended.

“All of a sudden I was immersed in genuine bluegrass music,” he recalled. “There were all these incredible banjo players and a whole world there that I didn’t know about. That just busted it open for me. I found out about Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers. And there was no coming back from that.”

Murphy graduated from college in 2012, moved to New York, and studied and played a lot of music. Two years later, there was, indeed, a coming back. To Boston. And before 2014 ended, Mile Twelve had taken shape.

“We all knew each other long before the band started,” said Murphy of the original quartet: him on guitar, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on fiddle, Nate Sabat on bass, and BB Bowness on banjo. “The Boston bluegrass scene is a pretty small world, and we would go to the Cantab Lounge for bluegrass jams or would be invited to the same picking parties. When I moved back to Boston, BB and Bronwen were wanting to start a group, and they were looking around for other people. Nate was still at Berklee, and we felt like the kids who hadn’t been picked yet for a kickball team. So, we all sat down and talked about it. We knew we needed a name and some songs. By the fall of 2014, we were having conversations about what our first gigs might be.”

And what exactly is the story behind the band’s name?

Murphy laughed and said, “When we came up with it, I thought it sounded like it really had a story to tell. But it’s a highway reference. It’s a mile marker on Route 93, by the Dorchester-Quincy border, marking the Boston city limits.”

The band hit the ground running, but something was missing, and they all knew that a mandolin player was needed to fill out the sound.

“But there wasn’t anyone in town who matched what we were looking for,” said Murphy. “So, we went on as a four-piece for about two years. But we were about to make our first full-length album, and we said it was now or never. David Benedict was a mandolinist living in Nashville who was friendly with a couple of people in the band. We talked with him, he thought about it a lot, and he moved up to Boston in the fall of 2016. I believe that’s when the band really started to take off.”

The album, “Onwards,” was released on October, 2017, and featured mostly originals with a couple of covers. Though Murphy and Sabat are the main composers, the originals all have a writing credit listed as Twelve Mile.

“When Nate and I bring a new song to the band it’s often a really raw, incomplete piece of music,” explained Murphy. “The other members are sitting and listening and they help shape the lyrics, and the arrangement is a whole other thing, with all of them also participating in that part. So, when it’s finished it’s been a collaborative effort.”

The band will be performing some of those songs at the Passim gig, but Murphy promises that the set list will be predominantly new music.

“We have a new album called ‘City on a Hill’ that we’ll be releasing around the end of March,” he said. “We’ll certainly do some classic bluegrass covers and some of the originals we’ve been playing for a while. But this will be the first time our fans will have heard a lot of these songs.”

Along with those songs, which Murphy describes as more straightforward bluegrass than some of those of “Onwards,” the audience will get the treat of seeing many people singing into one microphone.

“We do that pretty much at every show at this point, and it’s fairly typical in the bluegrass style,” said Murphy. “If we were a rock band, and everyone had electric instruments, and there were drums onstage, that would overpower the center microphone. But when we’re playing acoustic instruments and singing in a folk style, you can just huddle around a center microphone for vocals.”

Mile Twelve

WHEN: Jan. 10, 7 and 9:30 p.m.

WHERE: Club Passim, 47 Palmer St., Cambridge

TICKETS: $20

INFO: 617-492-7679; www.passim.org

Upcoming club and concert dates

Jan. 5:

Miss Tess & the Talkbacks mix together a bit of country, R&B, and early rock ’n’ roll at The Burren in Somerville. (4 p.m.)

Jan. 6:

Folk-rock-pop troubadour Steve Forbert continues his four-decade career at City Winery in Boston. (2 p.m.)